


This Ain't the Normal Line

by standalonefic



Category: The Hateful Eight (2015)
Genre: BDSM, Bondage, Developing Relationship, Extra Treat, Face-Fucking, M/M, Period-Typical Racism, Post-Canon Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-02
Updated: 2017-08-02
Packaged: 2018-12-10 00:15:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11680038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalonefic/pseuds/standalonefic
Summary: Welcome to the stagecoach route of sex, lies, and one or two truths.





	This Ain't the Normal Line

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PositivelyVexed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PositivelyVexed/gifts).



_Buffalo, 1877_

“Well, now, OB was my very best friend living,” Chris Mannix said, his eyes wide with earnestness, his voice just about dripping with honeyed sadness. “Him and me grew up together, we even split our first hunting dog right down the middle, that’s how close, sir, just like brothers almost.”

The stagecoach operator didn’t seem impressed. “Yeah? Which one of you got the dog’s ass out of that deal?”

Mannix went all teeth, not that that was something he was much equipped to find difficult. “Now, you’re joshing with me, sir, OB must have talked about me once or twice! Me and Marquis? That ain’t ringing any kind of bell?”

“It ain’t.”

“Come on,” Warren said. He didn’t want to spend all day chasing after Mannix’s foolish notion that he was the one to handle all this.

Mannix gave him a look that said it was his opinion Warren just didn’t want to lose and have to pay up and then turned his attention back to the operator, back to being nothing but sweetness and light. He was more convincing at it than he should have been. “Mister, the stake Marquis and I got up is all we have in the world, and OB sent us a letter saying come out to Wyoming and he’d sell his route to us, deep discount what with us all being friends. Now we come all the way out here and you tell me he’s dead and you ain’t budging on the price? OB’s gonna be turning over in his grave and you don’t want a good man haunting you like that.”

The operator looked over Mannix’s shoulder to Warren. “You sure _you’re_ working with _him_?”

Warren took his pipe stem out from between his teeth. “Feels a bit touch-and-go at the moment.”

“Not since Caesar has a man been so beset on all sides with traitors,” Mannix said.

“Little over-the-top, don’t you think?” the operator said.

“He never gets down much lower than that,” Warren said. “Chris, go take yourself a walk.”

Mannix heaved a sigh that did a repeat of his Julius Caesar routine and made his way to the door. Pretty soon Warren could just see him through the window, a neat figure in a road-dust-tanned jacket ambling over to their horses.

The operator put his little wire-rimmed glasses back on and started looking over his accounts. Whether he liked Warren better than Mannix or not, he still didn’t think he merited the same amount of attention. “I can’t say the two of you make a sensible picture. Was any of that true?”

“Sure. A couple of the ‘ands’ and most about every ‘the.’ We knew OB a little. And we did think to pick up his route on the cheap. But I’ll concede nobody made us a promise.”

“No, I didn’t think so. What’s a big black fella like you doing with him in the first place?”

“Like I said, we met each other through OB. We’re just looking for work.”

“The two of you,” the operator said. “Together.”

Warren packed in some more tobacco, his fingers steady. “You telling me there’s a chance you’d ever sell to me without him along to put his name on the papers? He may not have a brain in his head, but he’s got advantages I don’t.”

The operator pursed his lips. Warren had been counting on this. Having Mannix along worked about the same as the Lincoln letter for calming white folks down, and wasn’t that a sad thing: he could be the pen pal of a saint or the partner of a loudmouthed cracker and it didn’t matter which as long as he kept on sounding calm and having some kind of white voice in the vicinity to talk him up, show he could get along. Sometimes he wanted to burn the whole country from one end to the other.

“I assume if your partner’s prone to exaggeration,” the operator said finally, “he may have been undercutting the amount of the stake the two of you had pulled together and were prepared to offer.”

“May have been.”

“Truth is, I do want to get that route established again soon as I can, and lots of folks don’t want it now that we lost Six-Horse Judy _and_ OB. Speculation is it’s cursed. You ain’t superstitious?”

Warren smiled. “Just on the subject of black cats.”

“Yeah? They lucky or unlucky on your side of the fence?” He didn’t wait for an answer, which was good, because Warren was running out of conviviality. “All right, what _can_ you offer? And by now you know I know a liar’s face when I see one, so you be straight with me.”

The whole deal after that took about five minutes—“No, you go on and sign his name for him, if you can write, my ears won’t stand that asshole a second time,” the operator had said—and then Warren was striding out into the slushy mid-January afternoon with a stagecoach contract in his pocket. Mannix perked up like a daisy.

“You got it?”

“Didn’t I tell you I would?”

“Well, I don’t care _which_ one of us got it, just that we got it. How high’d you have to go?”

Warren scoffed. “Fifty more than you were offering.” Which still left them a solid forty thousand to the good.

Mannix slapped his thigh, grinning that stupid-ass grin of his. “Dumb son-of-a-bitch. Now that’s just a lack of imagination, major, a man not knowing how to haggle like that, coming out _that_ much the loser. That’s a sad thing.”

“Speaking of losing,” Warren said.

“You’re downright mean-spirited. I did my part in there, you ain’t never would have gotten him to cave if I hadn’t gone in swinging first.”

“Yeah, you annoy folks until they’re relieved to only have to deal with me, but _that_ wasn’t what you said was going to happen, white boy. You said you’d talk him over yourself, I could just put my hands behind my head and watch. And then there’s the other thing.”

Mannix had that pretty little pink flush up in his face that he got sometimes when he could sense Warren had backed him into a corner but he wasn’t sure exactly how. It was maybe what he looked best in. Oh, he was smart enough, but there was nothing quite like the way his mouth opened up just that little bit when he was getting freshly reminded that Warren was smarter still.

“Yeah, sir? What’s that?”

Warren slung his arm over Mannix’s shoulders, chummy, and said, close to his ear, “Called me Marquis out in front of people, didn’t you?”

“Now, major, that was downright crucial to the mood.”

“Chris, were you or weren’t you the one who said we ought to put a wager on this?” He took the silence as an answer, because it wasn’t like Mannix ever shut up if he could think of a single damn thing to say. “Then there you go.”

Mannix swallowed. “What are you thinking for the payout?”

“Nothing,” Warren said. “Until nightfall.”

So just an hour or so after dusk, both of them liquored up enough to be stupid but not enough to be limp-dicked in the bargain, he took Mannix out of the hotel saloon and into the dusty little alley that ran between the hostelry and the general store. They were both closed for the night and everything was quiet and dark except for the fireflies. Which wasn’t to say that they were safe from being heard or safe from being seen. But it only qualified as a lack of caution if he thought he’d have trouble pulling the trigger on any asshole who tried to make a fuss about the matter.

“Down on your knees now, Chris.”

“Let me ask you,” Chris said, already getting down, “why do you get to call me whatever the hell you want and I don’t get to do the same?”

“Why do you think? Besides, I got no urge to hear you calling me whatever the hell you like, I got my fill of that already.”

A firefly buzzed around Mannix’s head and sent little darts of light across his face, showing Warren that even when he could see him, there was nothing there to read. Sometimes Warren knew going into it that he was going to leave more marks than usual and this was one of those times; that freakish, ill-advised fondness he had for Chris could always, under the weight of the right memory, crack and splinter. Then he didn’t know what he was doing with this, why they had partnered up in the first place. He’d spent too long doing everything right to get things this fucking wrong. Not that he was stopping.

He might as well get something out of it.

He got his right hand into Mannix’s hair and took his mouth roughly. He wanted to do something Mannix wouldn’t like.

But Mannix’s hands went to Warren’s hips and his fingers were warm through the wool of his trousers, warm and steady, and when he struggled, he struggled in the way that only he ever had, and not any other white man in this position before him: struggled not to get away but to get closer, to do better, to put himself at Warren’s service instead of his mercy.

It didn’t make Warren want to hurt him any less, but it did make him want to hurt him differently. He eased his hold on Chris’s head just a little so Chris could move more naturally, could show off every sluttish little trick Warren had knocked and fucked and sometimes even coaxed into that mouth of his, could tilt back a little and look up at him, his eyes in the scant light looking green, almost cat-like. Warren ran his thumb along Chris’s jaw and up to his lips and Chris opened his mouth just a little wider and sucked in that touch, too. There was a little dry wood snap in Warren’s belly, something he couldn’t put a name to.

Enough of this bullshit. He thrust harder and Mannix took it. Damn, but they must have been a sight to anyone with eyes to see them, him fucking his white boy’s noisy damn mouth, his hand braced against the weathered wood of the stable wall, his eyes closed. His eyes _weren’t_ closed, he was looking, but nobody not right up on him would be able to tell. Nobody but Chris, who’d barely blinked himself since it all had gotten started, and who shut his eyes only as Warren came.

Warren, breathing hard, eased out of him. “What’s that taste like?”

Mannix spat. “Like I lost a bet.”

Warren kind of smiled, thinking that was funny despite himself. “If it sweetens it for you any, I never would have let you win.”

Mannix leaned forward and rested his forehead against Warren’s thigh. “Well, now that I did know, major, you’re as predictable as the fucking weather.”

“On your feet,” Warren said, reaching a hand down to him.

Mannix took it but didn’t see depending on help as any reason to stop bitching: “First it’s ‘get on your knees’ and then it’s ‘get on your feet,’ you’re a bossy son-of-a-bitch, no fucking wonder _you_ went to war.”

Warren kept hold of his hand but pushed him back against the wall, liking the way it made Mannix’s eyes widen, the whites suddenly showing clearly. He put his forearm against Mannix’s chest.

“Now, I didn’t mean it, major, don’t be that way about things.”

“Didn’t mean which part?”

He got the pleasure of a second or two of Mannix gaping at him like a fish, but one of the things that made Mannix a tolerable partner was he really could bullshit on the fly, and what made him something more than tolerable was that he occasionally even bullshitted his way into the truth. “Didn’t mean you were predictable. Now that’s the part that really got your blood up, you have to admit.”

“Oh, I do?”

“Major Marquis,” Chris drawled, “everything else you gotta hold as one of them alienable truths, just like Mr. Jefferson said.”

Warren snorted. “It’s _un_ alienable, hillbilly.”

“What I mean to say is that’s just you and me. Ain’t it?”

“You being an asshole,” Warren said, holding him still against the wall while reaching his other hand down to undo the row of slick pewter buttons on Chris’s trousers, “is no reason to keep being an asshole.” He took Chris’s cock in his hand and Chris made the same sound he always did when it happened, this kind of muffled gasp like he’d never expected such a thing. Warren was just drunk enough to think that was kind of cute, as far as Mannix’s stupid shit went.

They hadn’t resolved anything, but they were never going to anyway, so he went ahead and jerked Chris off anyhow, holding him pinned except for the twitching of his hips.

“Please,” Chris breathed. “Major, come on, faster, please.”

“I’m not getting your stuff all over my clothes, Chris Mannix,” Warren said, keeping on doing what he was doing, and when Mannix was close enough that his every breath was a sharp kind of whimper, Warren leaned forward and kissed him, tasted himself on Mannix’s tongue. His mouth was just as hot and eager then as it ever was on Warren’s cock and he downright moaned into Warren’s mouth as Warren pressed against him harder.

“I gotta—”

“Back down on the ground again and you can come on my boots.”

“Thank you,” Mannix said, too stripped-down in the moment to frill it up any, to give him anything other than bald gratitude, and he hit his knees hard enough that it must have bruised him and he did as he was told and then stayed down there, shaking a little. Warren looked at the part of his hair that was thinning and put his palm there. It was a dumbshit thing to do, but no dumber than the rest of this, except they had saved each other’s lives once and that had fucked it all up.

Warren said, “You learn anything from any of that, Chris Mannix?”

“Sure.” Mannix wiped his sleeve across Warren’s boots. “You’re a sore fucking winner.” He seemed intent at the moment on keeping his eyes on the ground. “It’ll be a good business, major, you know?”

“The stagecoach? It was my own idea, you don’t got to convince me of it.”

“I mean,” Mannix said, and then stopped. “Like as a co-venture.”

“That’s fine, Chris,” Warren said, and he thought he sounded weary and then he thought that he didn’t sound weary at all, and he didn’t know which to trust, his initial sizing-up or what had come after. Wasn’t that the entire fucking problem.

 

_Saddlestring, 1878_

“How’d the two of you meet, anyway?”

They got asked that question a lot. Folks listened to two seconds of Mannix’s hick accent and then looked over at Warren and then looked back at Mannix, who was half the time still in Smithers’s coat even though Warren kept threatening to burn it, and got curious. It happened often enough that even Mannix had gotten plumb sick of talking about it, and Mannix never got sick of talking about anything, least of all himself. By mutual agreement, the thousandth motherfucker who asked them for the story was going to be the blue-ribbon winner of a bullet to the head. They were on number two hundred eight.

At first, their explanations had just gotten shorter, but after they’d trimmed it down to either “got snowed in” or “we just did, now shut the hell up,” they just started lying their heads off.

Mannix was downright gleeful when Warren came up with it: got Warren’s prick out of his pants when they were barely inside their room that night and gave him a handjob just out of sheer friendliness. Warren didn’t mind getting called brilliant, didn’t mind that at all. May have been persuaded to respond with equal friendliness.

The rule that had emerged by tacit consensus was that they weren’t allowed to contradict each other: once one of them got started, the other had to shut up.

Warren enjoyed taking advantage of this.

“Well,” he said, “it’s a long story but an interesting one.”

Chris knew him well enough to try to head that off at the pass: “I wouldn’t say it’s as interesting as all _that_ , major.”

“He’s being modest,” Warren said, turning around just enough to address the passengers, ignoring Mannix’s attempt to spur the horses on into making enough of a clatter to drown him out. “See, we met during the war. Chris here was too smart to be a sucker for the Cause, too decent to ignore the crimes of the South, some of which were even the crimes of his very own family. Mannix’s Marauders, of which you may have heard.”

“Oh, honey, you know, I think I may have,” a woman said to her husband, very excitedly. “They were just _awful_.”

“Indeed they were,” Warren said solemnly.

Mannix was turning puce, which Warren found useful, because he’d always wanted to know what puce looked like, and huh, there it was.

“But not our man here.” He grabbed Mannix by the scruff of his neck and shook him a little. “His conscience was too fine for that. Tell you the truth, he’s delicate-stomached, too. Violence has always really made him a bit queasy.”

“Oh, I understand,” the lady said. “I’m the same way, Mr. Mannix.”

“Now, major,” Chris said through gritted teeth, “don’t you think you’re overstating things a bit?”

“Chris, Chris, the people are going to want to hear about all your heroism for the North.”

By the time they reached their stop at Big Horn, everyone in the coach had heard the touching story of how Chris Mannix had heroically faced down his daddy, getting himself formally disowned so he could cross to the Northern side with intelligence that would lead to a pivotal Union victory in which many Rebs met their (bloody) end. He’d even gotten himself commended by—Warren let a little hush fall—the President himself.

“Bless you, son,” one old man said, reaching out for Chris’s sleeve with a shaking hand. “Bless you for your service.”

Chris, torn between a belief in manners toward his elders and ongoing horror at what was happening to him, finally managed to say, “Thank you, sir,” with a sound like a cat retching up a hairball.

Once the passengers had all filed into the waiting hotel, Warren commenced getting the horses out of harness, well-aware that Chris wasn’t going to be much use for the rest of the night. He’d gotten down to giving his favorite, the chestnut he called Sally, a rub-down, and was checking the tenderness that had been up in the frog of her front left hoof the last time he’d had her out when Chris got his temper back enough to say, icily, “I guess you thought that was funny.”

“I thought it was hilarious,” Warren said. “You think her foot’s healed up?”

“I don’t give a—I mean, she ain’t swollen or anything but I’d say give her a rest if we can pick up a replacement here.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”

The sweet smell of hay and the light musty smell of manure was between them: horseshit, in Warren’s opinion, smelled more tolerable than any other kind. He said as much.

“What’s that have to do with anything? Major, you don’t got the right to—”

“What it has to do with,” Warren said, “is shit that I can tolerate and shit I can’t, and shit that you’ll eat with a smile if you know what’s good for you, and I think you can work the rest out for yourself. When it comes to your war record, white boy, or to your daddy or your whole goddamn part of the country, I’ll say whatever I please.”

Chris studied him with as much concentration as he ever studied anything, and it reminded Warren, in a way he didn’t quite like, of how Chris had looked once at Daisy Domergue—like he was saying to himself, _I’d bet my life you’re lying to me. I really would._

But what he said was, “I didn’t think you were that mad at me when the day got started, that’s all.”

“I’m always that mad at you,” Warren said.

That fucking look in Mannix’s eyes, still.

_Big Horn, 1880_

“Did you ever have a for-real house?” Mannix said one night, lying on his stomach in their cramped little hotel bed. “Like on your own?”

Warren shook his head, knowing Mannix would feel the movement even if he couldn’t see it. “When I was worn out with riding all the time, I’d just hole up at a boarding house, or at Minnie’s, no different from what I do now.”

It had been Minnie’s more than anywhere else. He could let himself feel sentimental about it if he were so inclined, could think about how he had felt he’d known every inch of the place down to the sugar dust in the bottom of the jar of peppermint sticks, but he pushed that away, reminded himself that he had managed to sleep there that many nights without remembering the fucking cellar when his life had nearly depended on it, so what did those memories matter anyhow? Except it’d been good to have a place, a kind of a place, and now he didn’t have that, unless he counted the coach. Which he guessed he could, because for sure he’d acquainted himself with the nicks and scratches in the wood, the tendency to pull to the right where it rode that front wheel a little too hard. But it didn’t feel the same, probably because of the coach always having strangers filing in and out of it.

The hotel rooms felt closer, as funny as that was. He was only ever in them with Mannix.

“Anyway,” he said, “a house goes better with a wife, maybe a couple of kids. Never thought that would suit me.”

He ran one hand down Chris’s back and Chris sighed and wriggled just a little closer to him.

Warren gave him shove back into place. “I never have wanted you to cozy up like that, and I’m not inclined to start tonight.”

“You inclined to start _something_ tonight?” Chris said, kind of hopefully.

Warren wrapped his hand around one of the bars in the headboard and shook it back and forth; Chris made an appealing noise way down deep in his throat.

It’d never been Warren’s policy, even back when he was hunting bounties, to carry handcuffs around. The way he thought of it, a man who carried handcuffs was a man who might one day decide to use them instead of his gun, and he wanted to guard against any future stupidity even on his own part. So he sure as hell hadn’t acquired any in the interim.

But they made do.

Nearabouts everything they owned that could be pulled into the service of lashing Chris Mannix to bedposts or binding his hands together had done that duty at one time or another. There were days when he couldn’t run a hand along his scarf without Mannix getting hard lightning-quick and cussing him out for it.

But his belt was his favorite, when the bed was like this one, when Mannix’s hands could fixed together up above his head. That stretch of black leather against the pale insides of Mannix’s wrists; the choice of which notch to use.

“Which one do you think?”

“Oh, dammit,” Mannix said, shifting around a little, like there was any angle he could get himself to that would hide what was happening to his cock as that strap tightened around his wrists. “Can’t you ever leave me alone?”

“I could get this fixed up and leave you alone then.” He settled on getting it as tight as he could and then fastened it, taking his hands away and letting Mannix see just how content he was to _leave_ them away. “Since you’re so particular about what gets done to your lily-white self. Maybe I shouldn’t do anything at all, help you preserve what’s left of your virtue.”

Mannix closed his eyes. “Now, major, we were having a nice night, weren’t we?”

“There’s nothing about us that’s nice, nights included.”

“I’m just _saying_.”

“Say something else.”

“Fuck you.”

He got one hand around Mannix’s hip and squeezed hard, right where there was barely any flesh on him, where he knew that touch was going right down to the bone, would leave one hell of a bruise by morning. “Something other than that. Because nothing happens unless you do.”

Mannix could get in bristly, uncooperative moods when he felt he’d been wronged and there was no way out of it except to either indulge him or overwhelm him, and Warren wasn’t the indulging type. This was home, maybe. A bruise growing violet-dark just above Chris’s ass and the squeak of leather and the smell of sweat; the feeling that he could, even now, either kill Chris Mannix or—

This: the terrain he knew most intimately.

Mannix spat at him and Warren slapped his face, hard and crisp but only once. More of a warning shot than anything else. Mannix hitched up his chin in a little half-nod, Warren’s palm-print pink on his cheek.

Warren smiled. “If I had a mirror, I’d show you how pretty you look with that mark on you.”

“Yeah?”

He traced Chris’s jawline. “Say you’d like that.”

Chris closed his eyes again, but desire won out over dignity, as it always did with him: “I’d like that real well, major. Would you touch me, please?”

“In a minute. You got me distracted now trying to figure out where else you should look pretty. Of course, if you had any thoughts in the matter, that could speed things up.”

“You’re pushing my fucking patience, major.”

“Joke’s on you there, Chris, because the thing is, me? I have patience to spare. I’m not the one who comes in my pants at the least little provocation. I’m not the one who couldn’t even wait for a decent hotel, that time outside of Story, and had to get myself bent over a wagon-wheel and jerked off into the dust. And I’m sure as hell not the one who begs. So you’d best rethink your strategy here.”

Chris stared him down like he thought there was any chance Warren wasn’t serious about it, and then he said, “Throat,” in a kind of mutter, sounding truculent as hell.

“There you go. Nice obedient white boy, wouldn’t your daddy be so _proud_.” Warren leaned down and kissed him, his hand closing just so around Chris’s throat, closing in enough to feel the flutter of his pulse, the moment his breath grew frantic. Then he eased, until Chris could kiss him back again, and then resumed, on and on until he was tired of it, until Chris’s lips felt so swollen that they counted as marked, too.

He drew back.

Chris looked like he was ready to lie down in front of their own coach and let it run him over, looked almost out of his mind.

“You get one word,” Warren said. “Because I’m generous. But you have to say it.”

He could almost hear the _please_ : his Chris had a nice way with that one when he was finally exhausted into using it properly.

But Chris, his eyes wide, his mouth wet, his gaze somehow drunken, said, “Yours.”

Warren was tempted to leave him. Never mind not getting him off, never mind not untying him, never mind the hotel room, the passengers, the route, the business, the whole fucking state of Wyoming. He was too much trouble. He was an accident waiting to happen. But instead of doing any of that, instead of acting sensibly at all, he just said, “That’s the right answer,” and wrapped his hand around Chris’s cock and brought him off in almost no time at all, got his fingers smeary with Chris’s spunk and used that to get his hole slippery enough to slide easily into it. And he fucked him like that, fucked him hard enough for the bed to shake, for there to be bruises from this, too. And he didn’t let himself think about anything. For once, there didn’t seem to be anything to think about.

 

_Sheridan, 1883_

They stopped every forty or fifty miles to let the passengers stretch their legs. Warren never could get used to being around folks so soft they would wander around as wobbly-legged as colts, worn out just from sitting still. Even Mannix had more grit than that. Though, he conceded, looking over to see the idiot trying to whistle on a grass stem, he didn’t have more sense. Warren plucked it out from between his fingers and tossed it.

Mannix just gave him a sleepy kind of grin and then leaned over and bumped their shoulders together. “ _You_ entertain me then, major.”

“If you had more going on in your head, you’d be able to entertain yourself.”

“That just boxes you in, don’t it? ’Cause then either I do need entertaining or I’m smarter than you like to say.”

Warren got a bit of a kick out of that. The summer had sunburned Mannix’s cheeks and the wind from the constant drives had worsened it, and he was, currently, one ugly son-of-a-bitch, so it was a good thing he had some virtues in other directions.

Mannix could always tell when he was in a good mood, and unfailingly, it made him frisky. He sparked up a cigarette and lit one for Warren off his own and passed that to him. Said, “Tell me about the meanest bastard you ever caught.”

“I didn’t _catch_ a single one of them,” Warren said. “And you’re living witness as to why that was a good policy. But the meanest one I ever killed, excepting Daisy and her brother, was a fellow named Big Mouth Pete. So-called Big Mouth because he was the most talkative dude folks in his part of the woods had ever heard of, since evidently you never came through that way.”

“You talk plenty yourself, black major.”

“True, but what I say is worth listening to. Case in point, the story of Big Mouth Pete. I chased that motherfucker all the way from Kansas.”

“From _Kansas_?”

“From Kansas to Wyoming. I got all this way, I figured it wasn’t worth coming back.”

“What the hell were you doing in Kansas in the first place?”

“You need to learn to settle for one story at a time, white boy. I was in Kansas after the war because I figured any place called everybody in the world called bloody was a place where a man could make a good living as long as he had a gun and not too many scruples, and the west seemed like where I wanted to be, good open country except for the Indians, and I’d established by then that I had no scruples about killing them either. So I got started bounty hunting in Kansas, which is where I came across Big Mouth Pete, which is the fundamental point of the fucking narrative.”

“So what’d he do?”

“Shot up the spelling bee.”

Mannix dropped his cigarette, an illustration in astonishment: “He shot up a fucking _spelling_ bee?”

“You gonna keep repeating everything I say with a question mark after it?”

“Like a spelling bee for kids?”

“Well, like I said, he was a mean bastard, and he’d flapped his mouth all over town talking about how his boy was sure to pull ahead, but the little pride and joy shit the bed early on, I forget on what word, but not one too hard. It pissed Big Mouth off, so he shot his son and then just took to firing. The town didn’t much support little white kids getting shot at, so they put enough of a bounty on Big Mouth’s head for me to chase him that far, especially since after a while it got to be a point of pride that I be the one to bring him down. I mean, hell, I was younger back then, I gave more of a shit. Not so much about the kids, although I’ll allow it was the worst thing a man ever did that I got _paid_ to kill him for, but just about not losing. Anyway, I shot him in the throat and that big mouth of his burped up blood, and that was the end of Pete.”

It was then that he noticed Mr. Oates, their hangdog-looking schoolteacher passenger, was listening to him and had gone all milky-white. “I don’t think any of that’s appropriate, Mr. Warren. There are children here.”

“It’s 'major,'” Warren said.

“And the kids are all the way down by the brook,” Mannix said. “You don’t want to get upset, Oatesy, maybe don’t fucking eavesdrop.”

Oates, his shoulders high, stalked off down to the brook, probably to tell the children currently prodding a dead gopher with a stick that their delicate sensibilities needed protecting and he was the man for the job. Warren watched as he jumped about half a foot when the gopher burst.

“Look at that asshole,” Mannix said. “Tell me he’s getting off at the next stop.” He stretched. “You know, major, in a perfect world, you and me would just drive back and forth on our lonesome and maybe then it wouldn’t take me damn near six years to hear a good story.”

“You’ve heard other stories in the meantime,” Warren said. He could have said something about that figure, those six years, on the tip of Chris’s tongue, but he didn’t.

_Red Rock, 1887_

 

When they retired, they weren’t allowed to keep the coach, but they did anyhow, drove off with it in the middle of the night. Warren called it a pension. He’d grown fond of it.

“We’ll have to build a barn to hide it in,” Chris said, patting one varnished side. “Unless you figure you want to cap our illustrious career by getting the both of us hanged for theft.”

“Why should I risk letting you outlive me?”

Chris scowled. “That ain’t funny.”

“Dumbass, we’ll need a barn for the horses already anyway, it ain’t like it’s special trouble.”

“I suppose.” Chris eyed the plot of land and held his thumb up in the air like he knew shit-all about how to measure off it. “You ever built a house before?”

“I told you,” Warren said irritably, “I never even had a house before. But there’s a first time for everything.”


End file.
